On Aug. 3, ”lights” or reflections of sunlight off an unidentified flying object appeared briefly near the International Space Station and caused a stir in media around the globe. The brief appearance of the bright and colorful unidentified object was first spotted by UFO enthusiasts and declared evidence of alien life watching Earth’s activities. The Seattlepi.com investigated and found more, much clearer video footage from Aug. 23 of a similar bright object keeping pace with the ISS for minutes at a time. Space junk? Aliens? NASA hasn’t commented. So, you decide. (Note: All video footage is taken directly — unaltered but zoomed in on and sped up — from raw recordings on the Ustream account of NASA TV’s live feed from the International Space Station.)

The baseline story is this: A recorded archive on NASA’s Ustream channel of the Aug. 3 live video feed from the International Space Station shows a pinkish, bright something or other floating above the Earth near the station. The ISS camera captured the image (all visible in the video above and gallery below) as it was panning right.

That’s it. The video was posted to YouTube and certain social media characters bandied it about as evidence that we’re being watched by aliens and NASA is covering it up. A few news orgs also picked up the story. Here’s what the UFO enthusiast said about the video on YouTube:

‘NO COLOURS HAVE BEEN ALTERED IN THIS OR ANY OF MY VIDEOS ! ‘ THE NEWS MEDIA ARE TRASHING THIS. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS CHECKOUT THIS NASA LINK – AT 7 minutes in – UFO http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/69904260 During a period when the camera is moving for a few minutes, Nasa captures a distant pink and gold object. Caught August 3rd, 2015. We need them to maybe start pointing the ISS cameras outward and stop treating people like children.

We wondered, how easy is it, really, to find these images of lights — zooming and blinking — in videos recorded live from the space station. After a couple hours of scrubbing through dozens of hours of footage, we found our own UFO on footage from Aug. 23 and it looks a lot like the one discovered on Aug. 3.

The footage is from around midday. In it, a “light” or reflection of sunlight appears near the International Space Station and stays in an exact relative position with the station for minutes at a time, appearing and brightening and then disappearing several times. Remember, the ISS is traveling at roughly 17,000 mph. (The images and video in this story have not been altered or brightened, only zoomed in and portions sped up in the video.)

That’s all we know. We pinged NASA and haven’t heard back. So, is it aliens? Or sunlight reflecting off a bit of space junk or a satellite?

You decide.

Here’s a video we made of a previous UFO sighting around the ISS.

Video by Jake Ellison

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